A recent IDC report — The Business Value of IBM Maximo — that surveyed 9 companies with an average of 8,500 employees, found that after these companies adopted IBM Maximo, it resulted in: a business benefit of approximately USD 14.6 million, on average, per year per organization; 43% less unplanned downtime per year; and USD 8.6 million in total equipment cost avoidances annually. 

IBM Maximo® Application Suite (MAS) is a single, integrated, cloud-based application platform for asset monitoring, management, predictive maintenance and reliability planning. Maximo maintains high-value assets with AI and analytics to optimize performance, extend asset lifecycles and reduce downtime and costs. To reap the best benefits with maximum performance, it’s essential to host the same on a scalable infrastructure, thereby the current trend is to migrate Maximo to cloud. In this journey, we are seeing an increased interest in migrating and deploying MAS on AWS Cloud.

The growing need for Maximo migration to AWS Cloud

Migrating to cloud helps organizations to drive the operational resiliency and reliability, at the same time keeping software up to date with minimal upgrade effort and infrastructure constraint. Due to increased demand of data-driven asset management, it is critical to combine data from different areas of an organization, which in turn helps organizations discover trends, make predictions and take better informed asset management decisions.

In line with this trend, last April IBM announced end of support for all Maximo 7.6 and add-ons by September 2025. As a result, the path forward for all Maximo EAM customers is to move to the latest cloud-based MAS. Therefore, Maximo migration and modernization has become even more important for clients.

To further support Maximo migration to AWS, IBM has now made available newer containerized versions of Maximo Application Suite as a Service (MAS SaaS) on AWS Marketplace with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) on AWS. MAS SaaS on AWS represents yet another important step in Maximo’s journey to integrate its standalone applications — like Monitor, Health and Visual Inspection — into a cohesive single suite of applications.

Why MAS SaaS is unique

MAS SaaS, a subscription-based service offered on the AWS, provides an operational environment deployed on AWS and operated and managed on a continuous basis by IBM Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) specialists using best practices. This collaboration equips customers with an industry-leading asset management system from IBM, supported by the scale, agility and cost-efficiency of AWS.

Moving to MAS 8 is both an upgrade and migration when using MAS SaaS. The upgrade is similar to previous upgrades with regards to the data, but the underlying architecture changes need to be done involving ROSA and other dependencies. The migration is similar to how clients moved from on-premise to our previous Maximo EAM SaaS Flex offering, but taking into account the differences with MAS. In order to migrate to MAS SaaS, perpetual on-premises customers would stop paying Service & Support (S&S) and purchase a SaaS subscription; on premises Subscription License customers would begin a new SaaS subscription; and existing MAS Flex and MAS Managed Service customers would begin a new MAS SaaS subscription.

To jumpstart the migration journey, businesses can design different migration and modernization paths beforehand, laying out potential modernization programs before making the investment using our proprietary IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator (ICCA) platform.

A global energy company’s approach to Maximo migration

Let us look at an example where IBM worked closely with an energy company that was facing the following challenges:

• Longer times to procure infrastructure required to support latest version of Maximo
• WebSphere being the core to Maximo had high availability and high-performance issues 
• Data sharing challenges across multiple applications due to lack of data fabric and integration layer
• Manual end-to-end deployment leading to complex setup, errors and security

The client chose the latest version — Maximo Application Suite 8 (MAS8) — as it addresses industry challenges such as risk of failure, rising maintenance cost and sustainability and compliance regulations. AWS Cloud was the preferred choice for the client to take advantage of greater deployment flexibility, scalability, high availability and secure architecture.  

Solution approach

IBM adopted the following approach to accelerate the energy company’s Maximo migration to AWS:

• Upgraded existing Maximo application from version 7.6.0.9 to version 7.6.1.2 using Infra as a code (IaC)
• Deployed using IaC provided the flexibility of spin-up the instance required for auto scaling. This automation helps to reduce the lead time to spin and run the new environment, also addressing latency issues due to multi-AWS availability zone deployment
• Used AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for data migration and schema conversion
• To minimize the database replication (DR) infra provision and keep the DR cost lower, IaC was used to spin the DR environment based on demand. DR capabilities used to keep data up to date within availability zone and DR region
• Addressed data sharing across applications using IBM Cloud Pak for Data and uniform integration layer using IBM Cloud Pak for Integration

Solution components

• Maximo Enterprise Application Management (EAM) is based on a 3-tier architecture with the following components:
  • HTTP/Web Tier and Application Tier using the IBM WebSphere and HIS deployed EC2 instance under private subnet, to keep application secure.
  • Database Tier is using the AWS Oracle RDS with replication enable to address the DR situation, running under private subnet.
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) was configured based on AWS best practices with public and private subnets
• Application servers and deployment manager were setup for autoscaling using the Auto Scaling Group  
• Maximo web-based UI resolution for external access using the AWS Route 53 service
• Web application firewall (WAF) was used as a first line of defense against web exploits
• IaC scripts on Terraform and CFT were integrated to provision autoscaling architecture

Reference Architecture on AWS  

How Maximo on RedHat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is helping clients

MAS 8.0 has now been containerized and available to run specifically on RedHat OpenShift. To ease this transition for customers unfamiliar with running containers in production, AWS has partnered with IBM and RedHat to develop an IBM MAS on ROSA reference architecture. ROSA is a fully-managed, turnkey application platform that allows companies to focus on deploying applications and accelerate innovation by off-loading the cluster lifecycle management to RedHat and AWS, and has now supported configuration for IBM MAS. This means that customers don’t have to create, manage and maintain their own RedHat OpenShift clusters for IBM MAS.

Maximo Migration and Operating Model

Top 3 ways to accelerate Maximo migration to AWS

In order to migrate to the cloud, there are three deployment models available to clients for running IBM MAS on AWS Cloud:

1. MAS SaaS on AWS powered by ROSA
2. MAS dedicated on AWS powered by ROSA
3. Customer-hosted ROSA

Reasons to adopt customer-hosted ROSA model

The customer-hosted ROSA option offers a powerful solution for hosting IBM MAS in a customer’s virtual private cloud (VPC) with ROSA. As a container application platform, ROSA enables seamless deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications, making it an ideal choice for a MAS deployment.

The advantages of this option are significant. Businesses can have full control over the infrastructure while still being subject to the organization’s monitoring, controls and governance policies, allowing for greater customization and flexibility to tailor the environment precisely to their needs. This control extends to implementing additional MAS integrations and the ability to enforce existing cloud security and governance policies. Also, ROSA charges are consolidated into the unified AWS bill and draw down on any AWS enterprise agreement, streamlining financial management.

Clients that have an AWS enterprise agreement or a Compute Savings Plan can take advantage of savings for the underlying infrastructure supporting the MAS implementation. Likewise, because the ROSA cluster runs in the customer’s AWS account, they have the option of purchasing upfront ROSA contracts and taking advantage of receiving either one-year or three-year savings plan on the ROSA service fee.

Why IBM for Maximo migration to AWS

Migrating applications to the cloud is a fundamental step in any modernization initiative. However, cloud migration is not a one size-fits-all approach and there are unique issues that impact each organization’s cloud adoption.

IBM Consulting’s Application Modernization offering helps clients migrate and modernize applications for AWS while reducing significant technical debt and accelerate the implementation of their digital initiatives, while minimizing business risk and improving business agility by moving their workloads to the cloud faster, cheaper and more efficiently. IBM brings unique set of cloud migration capabilities to accelerate client’s application migration to AWS:

• Cloud migration factory capability inclusive of proven frameworks and processes, automation, migration templates, security practices and AWS-specific migration squads accelerate and improve overall delivery efficiency.
• IBM Garage Methodology combined with IBM’s cloud services delivery capabilities, RedHat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) and robust set of AWS Migration tools and accelerators, expedite migration and cloud adoption.
• IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator (ICCA), the proprietary framework to de-risk migration and modernization journey. ICCA for your AWS Cloud automates many modernization tasks, reducing complexity while increasing the speed and business agility. Businesses can design different migration and modernization paths beforehand, laying out potential modernization programs before making the investment. Read about IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator for AWS Cloud.
• Our well-defined pattern-based migration approach including re-factor, re-platform and containerization by leveraging AWS provided managed services and industry leading tools help our clients with technical debt removal and optimization.
• Finally, IBM offers flexible t-shirt sized-based pricing models for different migration sizes — small, medium and large — ensuring clear and transparent migration scope for clients.

IBM has been working with clients in their application migration journey including with those organizations planning to move Maximo to AWS Cloud platform.

In summary, clients look for IBM’s expertise to:

1. Upgrade the current Maximo 7.6x version (that will expire in 2025) to MAS 8  
2. Moving workload from on-premise to AWS Cloud for elastic, scalable and highly available infrastructure and runtime

See what IBM Consulting can do for you

As an AWS Premier Partner, IBM Consulting™ brings business and IT transformation expertise, methodologies and tools—from across industries—to accelerate hybrid cloud journey on the AWS Cloud. IBM’s expertise in security, enterprise scalability and open innovation with Red Hat® OpenShift® help businesses grow quickly on the AWS Cloud.

IBM Consulting has more than 22,000+ AWS-certified cloud practitioners, 17 validated service delivery (SDD) programs and mastery in 17 AWS competencies to develop cloud-native apps in the AWS Cloud environment. IBM continues to strengthen AWS competencies through acquisitions like Nordcloud and Taos — innovations at IBM Research and co-development of solutions with AWS — making IBM Consulting the ideal partner of choice.